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This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.
This book is open access under a CC BY NC ND licence.
Leketi Makalela works in the Wits School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His research interests include translanguaging, African multilingualism and African languages and literacies.
Goodith White is Senior Research Fellow, University of Nottingham, Malaysia. Her research interests include language use in Africa, language pedagogy and the use of technology in political and educational contexts.
Contributors
Introduction
Part 1: Multilingual Practices
1. Leketi Makalela: Multilingual Literacies and Technology in Africa: Towards Ubuntu Digital Translanguaging
2. Epimaque Niyibizi, Cyprien Niyomugabo & Juliet Perumal: Translanguaging in the Rwandan Social Media: New Meaning Making in a Changing Society
Part 2: Linguistic and Cultural Maintenance
3. Elvis ResCue & G. Edzordzi Agbozo: Creating Translated Interfaces: The Representations of African Languages and Cultures in Digital Media
4. Kirsty Rowan: Mdocumentation: Combining New Technologies and Language Documentation to Promote Multilingualism in Nubian Heritage Language Learners of the Diaspora
Part 3: The Effects of Communication Outside Africa
5. Sarah Ogbay & Goodith White: A Network of Anger and Hope: An Investigation of Communication on a Feminist Activist Facebook Website, The Network of Eritrean Women (RENEW)
6. Bonny Norton: Identity, Language and Literacy in an African Digital Landscape
7. Susanna Sacks: Networked Poetics: WhatsApp Poetry Groups and Malawian Aesthetic Networks
Part 4: Language Change
8. Abdulmalik Yusuf Ofemile: Human–Agent Interaction: L1-mode Intelligent Software Agents Instructing Nigerian L2 Speakers of English During Assembly Tasks
Conclusion
Index